https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html Every week since the first commit I've sat down and written out what I built, what broke, and what I figured out along the way. Most weeks that's Cosmic Scale coming together one late night at a time, and every once in a while a side project sneaks in and takes over for a bit. Newest entries are at the top. en-us Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:36:48 +0000 https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-26 oaktree-devlog-week-26 Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Infinite Initiative went up in June as a one-week experiment, and the loudest note, including from me every time I played it, was that the cards did too much. One card could deal damage and apply a debuff and buff a stat, all crammed into fine print. So 0.6 tears the card set apart and rebuilds it… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-25 oaktree-devlog-week-25 Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Second sit-down-and-actually-play week in a month. This one ended with nine notes, and the rest of the week went into working down the list. The biggest note was the horizon. Cosmic Scale bends the world in the distance so it feels like you're standing on a small planet, but the bend was tied to… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-24 oaktree-devlog-week-24 Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Last post was all sky: storms you can finally watch, weather on all twelve biomes. This week was the opposite kind of week. Nothing new to look at. I went through the game one system at a time, saves to belts to buildings, looking for the quiet bugs that would embarrass me later. A theme showed up… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-23 oaktree-devlog-week-23 Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Last week was all under-the-hood work on the ending. This week I actually sat down and played Cosmic Scale like a player, and some of what follows came straight off that playtest list. The big visible change is weather. Storms already matter mechanically (they feed the machines that make some of… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-22 oaktree-devlog-week-22 Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 After five weeks on Infinite Initiative, this one is back on Cosmic Scale. The side project shipped and settled down, and the whole week went into a question I'd been quietly avoiding: does winning the game actually mean reaching Kardashev Type-1, the thing the pitch promises? Until now it didn't.… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-21 oaktree-devlog-week-21 Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The combat overhaul went out a couple of days ago, and this is the small follow-up that came from watching people actually play it. Nothing in here changes how the game works. It's all about making a fight easier to follow while you're in the middle of one. The big one is relics. They trigger on… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-20 oaktree-devlog-week-20 Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 This update started as a list of small fixes from playtesting and grew into the biggest pass I've done on Infinite Initiative since launch. Two things changed, really: combat now shows you everything it's doing, and difficulty scales the way a roguelike should. Everything in combat runs on glowing… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-19 oaktree-devlog-week-19 Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 First real update since launch, and most of it went into feel. The systems were already doing the right things under the hood. The screen just wasn't showing it. So the week went into closing that gap. Combat resolves one thing at a time now. Every buff, debuff, shield, and combo tick gets its own… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-18 oaktree-devlog-week-18 Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 I made a second game and put it online. It's called **Infinite Initiative**, it's free, and you can play it in your browser right now. It's a deckbuilding roguelike themed around tabletop game night. You pick one of nine classes, draft a deck, and fight your way down through floors of monsters… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-17 oaktree-devlog-week-17 Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Honest confession first: most of this week went to a side project instead of Cosmic Scale. It started as a break between art sessions, a little card game I'd poke at on off-nights, and at some point it had nine classes and a few hundred cards and stopped feeling like an experiment. So I let it have… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-16 oaktree-devlog-week-16 Mon, 25 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Memorial Day weekend gave me three days, and I spent nearly all of them in Aseprite, the pixel art program, with Unity barely open. Two jobs: ground art for the biomes, and animations for the player character. Every one of the twelve biomes got its own set of ground tiles, four to eight variants… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-15 oaktree-devlog-week-15 Thu, 14 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 This week I sat down and asked the game a hard question: is the build I keep calling feature complete actually feature complete? The honest answer was no. So multiplayer is now actual multiplayer, the weather buildings finally do something, and a bunch of numbers that were quietly wrong got fixed.… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-14 oaktree-devlog-week-14 Sat, 09 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The big one this week: the stone-age starter tool is gone, and a hand-held mining laser took its place. It fills the same role: point at a resource node, hold E, harvest. But the opening hour feels completely different. No fuel, no charge meter, no stamina bar. You land with the laser and you keep… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-13 oaktree-devlog-week-13 Sat, 02 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The game has an endgame now. Tier 7, Stellar, adds six new items: Plasma Conduit, Stellar Lens, Antimatter Cell, Singularity Core, Dyson Element, and Star Heart. All of them feed into the Dyson Sphere. It's not a single building you plop down; it's a five-stage project. Each stage wraps more of the… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-12 oaktree-devlog-week-12 Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 This week was mostly about making the game show you what it's doing. Machines used to just sit there whether they were working or not. Now an idle one drifts a little white smoke, a finished craft pops gold sparks, and a jammed machine glows orange, so you can spot a problem from a distance instead… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-11 oaktree-devlog-week-11 Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The game has a day and night cycle now. A full in-game day takes about thirty minutes, and the lighting follows the clock: cold blue at dawn, warm at noon, orange at sunset, then a moonlit night where the streetlamps and the little LEDs on your machines glow brighter as it gets dark. Weather came… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-10 oaktree-devlog-week-10 Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 ARIA finally got her dialogue this week. She's the game's AI narrator (it stands for Autonomous Resource Integration Assistant), and she's been sitting in the engine, silent, since the very first phase. Now she reacts to what you actually do: your first mine, your first jammed machine, your first… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-9 oaktree-devlog-week-9 Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Two things landed this week: the game has an actual ending now, and you can play it with friends on the same network. The ending first. The Space Elevator is the new victory condition. Deliver ten Space Components to its loading dock and you get an ending sequence. Space Components sit at the top… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-8 oaktree-devlog-week-8 Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The game generates its own worlds now. Start a new game and it lays out grasslands, desert, wetlands, and rocky mountains for you, with mountains and water each placed by their own pass so they end up where they ought to be. Under the hood it's Perlin noise, a standard technique that produces… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-7 oaktree-devlog-week-7 Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Automation is in. Place an auto-miner on a resource node and it mines by itself, stashing what it digs up until a belt carries it away. Once that belt is connected, the factory runs without you while you go explore. The world stopped feeling busy-clicky and started feeling productive. I also… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-6 oaktree-devlog-week-6 Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Research came online this week. There's a real tech tree now. Each node costs items, needs the ones before it, and unlocks new buildings and recipes when you finish it. It starts small, but it's set up to grow into all eight tiers as the rest of the content lands, and since adding a node on my end… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-5 oaktree-devlog-week-5 Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Two things went in this week: power, and building upward. Power went in first. Drop a pole, hook up a generator, and everything the pole can reach gets electricity. The game figures out the network on its own. Each grid balances what it makes against what it uses, and if you ask for more than… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-4 oaktree-devlog-week-4 Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The first machine went in this week: the Crafting Bench. Every recipe is a small data file that says what goes in, what comes out, how long it takes, and which machine can run it, so the bench finds the recipes it knows and lists them in a panel. You can also tell what a machine is up to just by… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-3 oaktree-devlog-week-3 Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Items, inventory, and resource nodes landed this week. Every item in the game now has a real definition: name, icon, stack size, category. So when you pick something up, the game knows exactly what it is. The inventory works the way you'd expect: a grid of slots, drag and drop, shift-click to move… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-2 oaktree-devlog-week-2 Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 You can walk around now. This week was the player and the world: I drew an eight-direction sprite sheet for the player (a set of walking frames for each direction you can face), wrote the movement system to go with it, and set the camera to follow you smoothly. The honest time-sink was the… https://oaktree-games.com/pages/devlog.html#week-1 oaktree-devlog-week-1 Sat, 07 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 The first commit went in this week. An empty Unity project, a new folder on the drive, a README with nothing in it yet. But after years of this game only existing in notebooks, it's real now. I've wanted to make a game for years, and it kept getting shelved because life was busy. Then a few weeks…